The Jesuits have a habit of beginning the particular. Their method of moral reasoning, casuistry, doesn’t leap to sweeping rules. Instead, it starts with messy cases, real people, the tangled minutia of life. On his podcast, Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell fell in love with that tradition “of setting aside principles and engaging in the specifics of the case in question.”

That kind of specificity may sound like an odd fit for the man who gave us broad, big-idea books like The Tipping Point and Outliers. But in another way, it’s the most natural move in the world. Gladwell, now 62, began his career as a business and science reporter, trained to notice detail and trace the story hidden in the evidence. From there he became one of the most influential non-fiction writers alive, shaping how millions of people think about success, risk and change. And in Revisionist History, the podcast he launched in 2016, he has found a new pulpit. From exploring “the forgotten and misunderstood” about Elvis and Freudian slips, Second World War fighter bombers and the idea of pulling the goalie much earlier than any self-respecting coach would ever contemplate doing, Gladwell looks at things in a different way. Again and again, he circles back to themes of compassion, conscience and the communities that try and fail to live them out.

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If you listen closely, a kind of gospel emerges. One line in particular anchors it: “Sin is the failure to bother to care,” Gladwell says in an episode about gun violence, riffing on a quote from Catholic theologian James F. Keenan, who described sin as a failure to bother to love. It’s a definition both bracing and........

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